I Made A Game for #TeamSeas

[Music] so a couple of weeks ago two youtubers you've probably never heard of decided to do something pretty awesome within the community and put together a little fundraiser project mark robert and mr beast as well as many other creators in the community have all come together to aid in the removal of 30 million pounds of rubbish from oceans lakes and beaches across the world through the team seas project for every dollar donated to team seas one pound of rubbish or trash as you all americans like to say will be removed from the beaches and lakes as of recording this video they're well over halfway to their goal and frankly i've loved seeing so many creators get stuck in and all come together to do whatever we can to help out which brings me to the topic of today's video this time around i have a lot more of you watching than when team trees was the thing so i figured maybe i could do something a little more substantial to help out and being a game development channel what better way to promote team seas than by building them a game so hi there i'm matt and welcome to game dev guide and something a little bit different because today i'm going to be making a game in a week to help remove some trash from the ocean i have a full-time job so i couldn't spend a large amount of time working on this game but i had a few days off during the week last week and so i wanted to produce something of quality within that time i decided to approach the project like i would a game jam in order to keep the scope reasonable and gave myself three official days or around 72 hours spread out over the week to design and build a team seize themed game thankfully i've had a little experience competing in game jams like this most notably the californian train jam and i picked up a few things after doing it for a couple of years so here's how i chose to approach the process based off of my previous experience i've learned that by the end of the first day most if not all of the game mechanics need to be in place because day two is usually going to be spent entirely on arts play testing fixing bugs and just cleaning up everything ready for the build this then allows for a mostly feature complete game leaving the time in the final day to be used for polish lust balance tweaks and music sounds etc without any major pressure it is a tried and tested approach that i've used multiple times in the past and usually sets myself up for success this means then that in order to get most of the mechanics down in a day a lot of the process relies heavily on picking an idea that would work within that scope thankfully one of the best ways i've found to do that is to lean towards a design that is mostly tried and tested you don't want to be wasting crucial time reinventing the wheel so it's worth basing an idea off of something you already have experience with or you know you could recreate without too many questions with this all in mind an idea actually came to me pretty quickly you remember the classic flash game gold miner well what if we did that but instead of mining gold you're a boat trying to grab trash out of the ocean and thus trash miner or something similar the title isn't too important just yet so with the design idea selected it's time to make some notes about it and plan the three-day sprint which leads me into the sponsor for today's video miller notes millernote is different from most other planning software that you've probably heard of the tool is more like working on a wall within a studio allowing you to collect inspiration plan out tasks and develop your ideas all in one place the interface is intuitive and flexible allowing you to drag drop and arrange things in whatever way makes sense for you like moving sticky notes and pages around on a wall for this project i used millinote to plan out the design ideas and general scope of the game being able to put all of my ideas down in one visible place was super handy for this project at a glance i could see my references the small design changes i wanted to make and even build out a task list for each day of the sprint and while i didn't need it for this project if i'd wanted to i could have created different boards for different parts of the design breaking each area of production up into its own workspace and board can be private or shared so if i was in a team i could control who sees what within the project milino helps you organize the complexity of designing a game with ease and it's been a great platform for me to flesh out the idea for this little game i'll definitely be using it more in the future for game jams if this sounds like your thing too milino is free to use with no time limit so whether you're creating a short game jam on a micro budget to help promote a charitable cause or planning a multi-year project it's no different the link is in the description down below to sign up now let's get stuck into making a game shall we after the initial planning stage i figured out the three key components i needed to create to get the gameplay working varying somewhat from my source material my idea was to give the player a little more control and actually have them move the boat and aim the line this means that the first mechanic i needed was a boat that could move across the screen then i needed to be able to aim the line i then needed to be able to fire said line and retrieve it and finally i needed to generate a bunch of rubbish within an area to add some challenge and keep the game compelling after a single play i knew i'd want some kind of progression system via upgrades or something but wasn't 100 sure i'd have time for it and i wasn't totally clear on how i wanted to handle it just yet but i knew i could keep it in mind while i was flashing out all of the other mechanics so first things first i needed a boat i decided to just use the sprite shape tool to build out a rough boat shape and seeing as we're doing this for team seas i decided to make the boat look a little bit like the boat used by the ocean cleanup as part of the aiming mechanics i wanted the crane head to move so i broke that up into its own shape and hierarchy allowing it to rotate freely i added a player input component and began setting up the movement code i had some trouble figuring out how i could just build the aim mechanic for both a mouse and controller that made sense if i was just working for a mouse input i could get the crane head to just point towards the mouse but i didn't want to rely on a virtual cursor for controller input so i actually settled on creating an aim target that the player could move using their mouse or controller and have the crane point towards that target instead i knew i wanted to keep the angle of the crane within a limited range as that would cause the player to have to move the boat to be able to reach rubbish on the other side of the screen so i needed to clamp the aim to a fixed position within the width of the boat to restrict the area that the line could cover once it was deployed from any given position and at this point i was ready to get the boat moving this was actually a pretty simple setup so i spent a little bit of time getting the movement right and then with that done it was time to set up the line thankfully this was super straightforward due to unity's line renderer component i set up a start and end point and then tweened between those two points over a fixed time whenever the fire button was pressed things were looking pretty good most of the player controller was now set up onto polluting the ocean with trash i mean generating trash for you to remove from the ocean i wanted to get the grabbing mechanic in place first so just stuck a placeholder sprite in place and a couple of colliders on both the trash item and the end of the line when the line deploys the collider update its position to match the line well it was supposed to but as you can see here my first attempts were a little off base a couple of tweaks to the code however and i finally got the line and its collider synced up all i needed to do then was detect an overlap between the lines collider and the trashes and then tell the line controller that it's hit something and start retrieving once the trash item is hit i just parent it to the lines collider so that it moves along with it [Music] one of the features i really like about the gold miner game is that the line takes longer to return so i added a little multiplier value to the script for the item that modifies the retrieval time when caught and would allow for some interesting challenge when grabbing smaller items from the water versus larger ones as larger items would offer a higher score but take longer and vice versa for smaller items on that note it was time to set up the scoring i added a debug label to the trash items and put in a super basic ui with some text fields to keep track of time and score i also registered the event for the trash being retrieved and removed it from the scene once the line was fully retracted all that was left to do now was generate more trash i created a few different prefab variants to represent the different sizes of rubbish and then procedurally spread them out around the scene it took me a minute or two to figure out why it was all clumping in one corner but eventually i figured out my user error in the code and got the min and max bounds working properly [Music] mechanically the game was more or less in place at this point the only thing missing now was an actual game loop so i began working on registering the time up event and updating the controllers to respond to it stopping all of the controls once the time was up everything was feeling a little bit static at this point and i was making good time so i wanted to see if i could add a little bit more life to the scene by having the rubbish float a little bit while in the water i went through a few iterations of this [Music] but eventually just settled on a simple up and down motion [Music] it didn't look too great having them all in sync though so to fix it i just randomized the animation offset and speed of each item when it's generated i think the final result really helped sell the idea of this stuff being submerged in the water and that was the prototype complete in more or less a day of work all i needed to do the next day was finish the gameplay loop i built a little end screen to show your stats and some buttons to play the game again quit or go back to the main menu which led me to creating a main front-end menu together along with some options and a little intro screen to tell new players how to play at this point i'm still focusing mostly on the functionality as i knew i could clean all this up during the art pass the next day after a little play test i realized that i really needed to distribute the various trash items due to the randomization a lot of the heavier and higher scoring items were close to the top of the screen making it way too easy to score big too frequently part of the challenge of the game should be the player choosing to go for the bigger ticket items which are further down and slower to retrieve which the player is then paying for in time i jumped into my generator script and set up three different value areas that i could spread the trash items into based on their generated value i added a little bit of overlap so that the distribution looked a little bit more natural and overall i was much happier with the final layout i mentioned it earlier but it was also clear to me at this point that the game seriously needed a progression system to keep you hooked after a couple of plays it was feeling a little shallow so i built out a basic experience bar and leveling system and then an upgrade area in the end screen i added some stats in my gameplay manager for each of the upgrade levels and when the tokens were spent increased the levels each of the different controllers could then sample the corresponding values from an array based on the current level of each of their stats with that working the main gameplay code was complete the final thing i did to end out the day was add some music to the gameplay and end state i tried to find something compelling and upbeat that lasted roughly the same amount of time as the gameplay session this could then act as an audible cue to the player and give them easy feedback for how long they have left in a given session [Applause] [Music] i also added some funky end of session music with the gameplay done it was on to the art i used the team c's website and branding as a baseline for the color palette and got stuck into creating all of the various assets the first thing i wanted to do was clean up the crappy blue rectangle and build out a much nicer looking background so i put together some various layers of waves and clouds breaking them up into layers and animating them to move across the screen slowly over time i then built out a much better looking version of the boat and its crane and replaced that in the scene as well with that i also wanted to replace my little debug aiming square with something that more accurately shows the player where they're aiming i designed a small little arrow and plopped that as a child of the crane head so that it would rotate alongside it hinting at a given trajectory finally i created a number of different assets to represent the various trash items and the different weights some small ticket items medium-sized ones and then big heavy stuff floating at the bottom with all of the art replaced in the main scene the final look of the game was starting to come together i really wanted to sell the concept of cleaning up the oceans upon booting the game so i went ahead and updated the front end menu scene to use the new water assets and then added a particle emitter that would just generate floating trash around in the background it's a neat little screensaver effect while you're sitting on the menu but also has an impact on the environmental message i also settled on a final name and logo for the game the rather utilitarian ocean cleaner i spent the rest of the day then cleaning up all of the ui which brings me to the final day which was spent cleaning up the rest of the ui adding some final bits of polish such as some ui animation score feedback tutorial artwork and making sure the controller input worked all the way through the game all that was left was to add some sound effects and a bit of balancing in the mixer and there we have it a full complete micro game built in just under a week to help promote team seas overall i am really happy with how this game turned out frankly i don't consider myself that much of an artist but i think it looks pretty good and feels pretty good considering all of the constraints if you'd like to check the game out for yourself you can head over to gamedev guide dot co dot uk team sees to download and play the game for free i'll also see if i can get it working in the browser too any donations made when downloading the game will go directly towards the tmc fund and of course if you want to donate separately you can use the fundraising link below this video or head over to teamsees.org a huge thank you to anyone who checks out the game be sure to share it with your friends and family if you enjoy it and share this video to help promote the cause let's get those oceans cleaned up if you enjoyed the video be sure to hit the thumbs up button and let me know your thoughts on the game down below if you're new to the channel firstly welcome and thanks for watching it all the way to the end here please consider subscribing as you'll know when new videos from me go live if you'd like to see more from me first you can click the link on screen now to check out another video that's it from me as always thank you very much for watching and i'll see you again next time

Channel: Game Dev Guide

Views: 13,282

Keywords: unity, learn, games, gamedev, how to, making games in unity, tutorial, unity tutorial, learning unity, unity3d tutorial, programming, making games, #teamseas, teamseas, team seas

Id: fyucZYPfZ5Q

Length: 13min 14sec (794 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 21 2021